“What the hell does that mean?” Lenore said.
The Antichrist exhaled. “Let’s pretend just for fun that it’s the late seventies, and Lenore is in her blue period, and is still keeping exclusively to her study, and snapping at anyone who comes near, including poor old Grampa, who was getting ready to die, and being generally pathetic ...”
“Get on with it. My bottom hurts.”
“And anyway, in this game-context, that Lenore is still Skeptical as hell, or at least strenuously adopting the pose, and ostensibly convinced that all she is is the act of her thinking, à la the French-man, although Lenore would say all she is is the act of speaking and telling, but that’s so bullshitty it makes my tongue hurt, and anyway luckily unnecessary, and so we say that all she is is the act of her thinking; that’s the only thing she can be sure of, is just her being her thinking.”
“Is this real, or are you saying all this because you’re flapped?” asked Lenore.
“Please hush,” LaVache said. “I’m hard at play. So all Lenore is is her act of thought, nothing else can be ‘assumed.’ ” He lay back and looked at the reddening sky, the joint resting in a carved initial in the leg. “So she’s her thinking. And, as we know, all thinking requires an object, something to think of or about. And the only things that can be thought about are the things that are not that act of thought, that are Other, right? You can’t think of your own act of thinking-of, any more than a blade can cut itself, right? Unless you’re the guy who’s significantly lowering Nervous Roy Keller’s quality of life, but I refuse to think about that until the leg demands that I do so. So, we can’t think ourselves, if all we are is the act of thinking. So we’re like the barber. The barber, if I recall, shaves all and only those who don’t shave themselves. Here Lenore thinks we think all and only those things which do not think themselves, which aren’t the act of our thought, which are Other.”
“Hell of a game,” Lenore muttered.
“But then we remember that all we are is our act of thought, in the game, for Lenore,” LaVache said, fast, now, and slightly slurry. “So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we’re thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn’t think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can’t think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can’t ourselves be the object of our thinking. Q.E.D.”
Lenore cleared her throat.
“But if we can’t think ourselves,” the Antichrist continued to the sky, trying to lick his lips, “that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can‘t, we can. KA-BLAM,” LaVache gestured broadly. “There go the old crania.”
“Dumb game,” said Lenore. “I can think of myself any time I want. Here, watch.” Lenore thought of herself sitting in the Spaniard home in Cleveland Heights, eating a frozen pea.
“Dumb objection, especially from you,” the Antichrist said to the sky. “ ‘Cause do you really think of yourself? What do you think of yourself as? Shall I recall some of our more interesting and to me more than a little disturbing conversations of the last two years? If you don’t think of yourself as real, then you’re cheating, you’re not playing fair, you’re chute-hopping, you’re not thinking of yourself.”
“Who says I don’t think of myself as real?” Lenore said, looking past the Antichrist at the bush he’d gone to the bathroom in.
“I’d be inclined to say you say so, from your general attitude, unless that little guy with the big mustache and the movable chairs has conked you on the head or something,” said the Antichrist. “It’s my clinical opinion that you, in a perfectly natural defensive reaction to your circumstances, have decided you’re not real—of course with Gramma’s help.” LaVache looked at her. “Why is this all so, you ask?”
“I haven’t asked anything, you might have noticed.”
“It’s because you’re the one on whom the real brunt of the evil—shall I say ‘evil’?—the brunt of the evil of this family has fallen. Evil in the form of these little indoctrination sessions with Lenore, which I’ve got to tell you I’ve always regarded as pathetic in the extremus. Evil in the form of Dad, who, having totally fucked with our mother’s life, for all time, is trying to fuck with your life in all kinds of ways I bet you don’t even know about, or want to know about. Think now of the circumstances leading up to my own particular birth. The same way Dad’s tried to fuck with my life, everybody’s. Just as he was fucked with in his turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats.” The Antichrist laughed. “That’s a poem. Anyway, you’ve borne the brunt. John was off to Chicago with his slide rule and a whole lot of masochistic baggage by the time he would have been any use to Dad or Lenore; I’ve had a limb and a thing to fall back on; Clarice was clearly inappropriate in terms of disposition—we needn’t discuss all that. But so you’re it. You are the family, Lenore. And in Dad’s case, go ahead and substitute ‘Company’ in the obvious place in the above sentence.”
Lenore reached under and removed a bit of stick she’d been sitting on.
“But Lenore has fucked up your life even further, sweetness,” the Antichrist said, sitting back up with the joint and looking at Lenore. “Lenore has you believing—stop me if I’m wrong—Lenore has you believing, with your complicity, circumstantially speaking, that you’re not really real, or that you’re only real insofar as you’re told about, so that to the extent that you’re real you’re controlled, and thus not in control, so that you’re more like a sort of character than a person, really—and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn’t she?”
“I wish it would rain,” Lenore said.
“You just had a shower a little while ago,” LaVache laughed. “You’re a nervous wreck, sis. Don’t be so nervous. Here. Kiss the bird for a second.” The Antichrist was holding up the joint, which Lenore saw was burning down one side much faster than the other.
“I don’t want any,” Lenore said. She glanced at the sun, which was now sticking Kilroyishly over the top of the gymnasium. “How about if we just spontaneously abort this line of conversation, Stoney, OK? Since, if I were maybe to ask you to help me out with respect to this supposed evil-and-reality-as-opposed-to-telling problem, what you’d do is obviously just tell me something, so that the whole thing would—”
“Don’t call me Stoney,” said LaVache. “Call me LaVache, or the Antichrist, but no more Stoney.”
“You don’t mind Antichrist, which I have to say is just about the most disturbing nickname I’ve ever heard? But you mind Stoney?”
“Stoney is everybody’s name,” the Antichrist said. He spat white again. “Everybody in the family with male genitals is Stoney. Stoney reminds me I’m probably just a part in a machine I wish I wasn’t part of. Stoney reminds me of deeply annoying expectations. Stoney reminds me of Dad. As Stoney I’m more or less just educed ...”
“What?”
“... but as the Antichrist I just am, ” said the Antichrist, waving the joint grandly at the red and black horizon. “As the Antichrist I have a thing, and it’s gloriously clear where I leave off and others start, and no one expects me to be anything other than what I am, which is a waste-product, slaving endlessly to support his leg. I’ve also just sort of helped you, here, I think, if you bothered to notice.” With his finger the Antichrist wet the side of the joint that was burning too fast, to make it bum slower.
Lenore wasn’t looking at her brother, but at the gym shadows, which were visibly moving across the fields. A shadow from a different part of the gym began to edge up the west side of the hill, to their right.
“Do you hate Dad?” Lenore asked. “Do you think I hate Dad?”
“Well, now, seeing as how you’re you ... ,” the Antichrist playfully pretended to punch Lenore in the arm
, “I can’t speak for you, but only for me, regardless of what I might say about you. Verstehen?”
“Pain in the ass.”
“I don’t hate Dad,” said the Antichrist. “Dad just makes me millenially weary. I find Dad exhausting. The stump aches, horribly, whenever I’m around Dad.”
Lenore hugged a knee to her chest.
“The one who hates Dad is Mom,” LaVache continued, “or, that is, she would if she were Mom. The person I saw last month resembled a mom in no way whatsoever. John Lennon, yes. A mom, no.”
“You miss Mom.”
“I miss a mom. Mom’s been in that place practically my whole life. Certainly at the beginning. My whole life is to an extent why she’s in there, right? Although I do remember that one year when I was nine. And then Dad and Miss Malig sent her right back again.”
“Well, she was trying to climb again. You can’t just have somebody trying to climb up the side of your house all the time.”
LaVache didn’t say anything.
“But it’s a shame you never got to really know her. I thought she was a good person. Really good.” Lenore moved her head to make the fields sparkle in the half-light.
“I just feel an affinity, is all, probably,” LaVache said. “No, for sure I do. Mom’s head and my leg were taken out in the same dancing accident, after all. At least I got left with a thing. Mom’s thingless.” He picked the sliding-man label up from where it lay on Lenore’s leg near the lacy hem of her white dress. “Interesting thing here is that it looks like this guy is climbing up dash sliding down a sort of sand dune. See the way his feet sink? And see this sort of cactus? I feel the implication of Desert, Lenore. Food for thought, in my opinion—no pun intended.”
“But since his feet sink in the sand, then we know for sure he’s climbing and not sliding,” Lenore said, taking the drawing. “ ‘Cause if he had slid, there would have to be slide tracks all the way down from the top.”
LaVache looked at the label and fingered his red chin. “But if he’s climbing, then there ought to be footprints leading up from the bottom, in the sand, which there aren’t.”
“Hmmm.”
“Looks like Gramma screwed up, unless perhaps the guy was dropped from a helicopter into this exact position; that’s one possibility Dr. W. never fathomed. I guess there were no helicopters back in his day. Technology does affect interpretation, after all, doesn’t it?”
“Hmmm.”
The Antichrist gave Lenore the drawing back. “Can Vlad the Impaler really talk now?”
“You should hear it. His language was getting worse, too, over the last week or so, although I haven’t been home in a couple days. ” Lenore saw that the man in the drawing was smiling broadly, in profile, and had what seemed to be a shadow, unless it was just the sand.
“What does he say?”
“Unfortunately mostly really obscene stuff, because he’s around Candy all the time.”
The Antichrist groaned. “I’m tingling all over. The leg may spontaneously detach.”
“Except we’ve been teaching him stuff out of the Bible, so Mrs. Tissaw hopefully won’t evict me if she hears him,” Lenore said. “She’s already ticked off because Vlad tends to chew the wall.”
“Can’t wait to hear him.”
“My bottom really hurts,” Lenore said. “I think I’d like to go back. Rick might be back at your dorm and wondering where we are. Would you like to come to dinner with us? I predict Rick’s going to want to go to the Aqua Vitae.”
“Let me just gather my resources for the trip back, for a second,” said LaVache. He massaged the leg with a hand. “If I can drive a stake through the heart of Nervous Roy’s Hegel problem without making you guys wait too long, I’ll gladly come.”
“Look, by the way, do you mind if I tell Dad you have a phone?” Lenore said. “Dad is crazy about you.”
“All sorts of different truths in that statement.”
“He’s pinned all his hopes on you, he says.”
“Pins tend to smart, I’ve found,” LaVache said.
“At least you should tell him you call a phone a lymph node.”
“Well, gee, then I might as well call it a phone,” the Antichrist said sulkily.
They both looked at the athletic fields and the forests behind them. Long spears of shadow were moving across the breadth of the grass. Shadow-gaps sparkled with sprinkler-dew. Two very tiny figures emerged from the edge of the trees of the bird sanctuary, far away, and started walking across the wet fields toward the hill. One of the figures, the shorter one, wore a brown beret.
“Hey,” Lenore said quietly.
She saw the two figures stop. The taller one, whose hair looked red in the red sun between the gym-shadows, bent over and felt the wet grass with his hand. The two figures slipped off their shoes and socks—the taller one merely his shoes, because he wore no socks underneath—and continued walking. They got to the bottom of the hill.
“Well that’s Rick right there,” Lenore said to the Antichrist, pointing to the man in the beret. She waved. Rick looked up at her for a bit, his hand to his hat, confused, then finally smiled broadly and waved back. He said something to the other man, pointing at Lenore.
“Who’s that other guy?” asked LaVache. He tossed away his roach and struggled to get to his feet.
“I don’t think I know,” Lenore said. She stared at the taller man, who walked the hill well, one hand holding boat shoes, the other helping Rick Vigorous, who was having trouble, sliding back in his bare feet in the wet grass of the bottom of the steep hill. The taller man grinned at his efforts, and some of the last bits of fiery sunset over the gym hit his teeth, which shone red.
“Do I look all right?” Lenore said to LaVache.
“Nut,” LaVache said. “Help me up, please.”
Lenore helped her brother up. The two men got close to the curve of the top of the hill, where the grass became dry and brown. Rick no longer needed help. There were voices, back and forth. The Antichrist was having balance problems. The very last of the sun sucked itself down behind the gymnasium, to the west. A cool shadow filled up the field, then climbed the hill all the way to the Memorial. The shadow covered the four figures, as they came together, and they were gone.
PART TWO
12
1990
/a/
“Perhaps I’ll try another crustless Hellman‘s-less ham sandwich, with you taking whatever steps might be possible to minimize the saltiness of the ham.”
“....”
“And a Canadian Club and distilled water.”
“Sure. How about Lenore? Is Lenore asleep?”
“Fnoof, fnoof fnoof.”
“So it would seem.”
“Sir, how about you? Would you like anything?”
“Ma‘am, while I take a minute to formulate a suitable answer to that, you could bring me a beer. I don’t need a glass.”
“All righty.”
“Thank you, miss.”
“....”
“Who the hell is that?”
“I think her name is Jennifer. She’s the Stonecipheco stewardess.”
“Hang me upside down if that’s not the beautifulest goddamn stewardess I ever saw. Would I like anything, she says.”
“Ahem. Lenore has given me to understand that Jennifer is married to the Stonecipheco pilot, in whose hands our lives at the moment happen to rest.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Would you care for some gum?”
“Not if I got beer coming. You sure chew a lot of gum, R.V.”
“I have ear trouble on planes. Normally I loathe gum.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not to mention planes themselves.”
“Ho there, Lenore. You up?”
“Fnoof.”
“I so envy people who can sleep on planes, Andrew.”
“She sure is a nice sleeper. My wife, when she sleeps, sometimes her mouth hangs open. Sometimes a little bit of spit comes out of her mouth and
gets on the pillow. I hate that.”
“Lenore is a lovely sleeper.”
“Look, R.V., does Lenore remember me or not? Like I said, I’m just positive it was her I met that night I met my wife. I was a little bit trashed, but still.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me. An appropriate context for discussing the issue didn’t arise, last night. She fell asleep almost immediately.”
“Those Howard Johnson’s beds are comfortable all right. Howard Johnson’s kicks ass. I appreciated the room, and the dinner, and the use of the razor. The Flange just about cleaned me out. I can’t believe I was too stupid to bring more money up with me.”
“Not a problem at all. Stonecipheco will absorb it. Consider it an advance.”
“Except the thing is, I’ve been thinkin’ about it ... hey, thanks, looks great. The beer, too. Heh-heh.”
“....”
“Thank you, miss. I believe that will be all for now.”
“Just ring if you want anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Just ring, she says. She’s a tease, ain’t she? Lord, though, look at that. That’s a first-rate pooper, under that skirt.”
“Crusts, again. The girl seems incapable of removing crusts.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Please go on with what you were saying.”
“Well, I was thinkin’ about the night I think I met Lenore, the night I met Melinda-Sue, and what happened was me and this other guy, who turned out later on to be a real loser, we went over to Mount Holyoke, and kind of barged on into these girls’ rooms, for a kind of fraternity thing. I don’t quite remember what.”
“....”
“And I remember I think Lenore got pissed off. She was real young and I don’t think she knew the whole story. I remember she threw a shoe at the guy I was with.”
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